8 hours Ago By Katie Schulder-Battis
From a plot of land that she has occupied for 38 years while farming fish in Hong Kong’s San Tin area, Lai Kam-dai has watched as Shenzhen grew into a major city across the Sham Chun River. “This is new,” Lai said in Cantonese, pointing at the skyline across the border from Hong Kong. Shenzhen’s population grew from under one million in 1990 to an industrial megacity, currently home to more than 13 million people.
For Lai and her neighbours, Shenzhen’s rapid development is a harbinger of what’s to come in San Tin. The government’s proposed Northern Metropolis development project threatens to transform the agricultural village in Yuen Long into a megalopolis nearly identical to its mainland counterpart. Some 18,000 local residents, including tenant farmers, pond operators, and landowners, must now reckon with the imminent compulsory takeover of their land and their resulting displacement – Lai among them.
This will not be the first time the 70-year-old’s livelihood has been hit by development. Lai’s father worked as a fisherman before moving his family to Tin Shui Wai in 1962, where they took up fish farming. “Back in Tin Shui Wai, the whole family lived together in these wooden houses, and everyone was very poor,” Lai told HKFP through an interpreter.
“So everyone in the family – the adults and kids – would help harvest and sell the fish.” Once Lai married her husband Chan Kwok-sun, now 73, whose family also raised fish, the couple began their own pond operations nearby. Then, in 1986, their farmland was taken over by the government to create Tin Shui Wai New Town in the northwestern New Territories.
The development uprooted Lai and her family, who were among the first operators to move to San Tin and help in constructing the fish ponds there. Back then, Lai practised a traditional form of integrated farming that combined fish culturing with duck farming. Raising ducks in enclosures above fish ponds allowed their manure and spilled feed to fertilise the ponds with nutrients, reducing the cost of feed and creating two channels of income.
Recognised by the United Nations as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System due to its sustainability and benefits to local ecosystems, the method was outlawed in San Tin following an outbreak of avian flu in 1997, which killed six people and hospitalised 18. Lai recalled that roughly 20 years ago, officers from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department came to take her ducks away. Business has since slowed, and Lai said that in the last seven or eight years, the market for fish has been flooded with imports from mainland China.
In 2023 , at least 95 per cent of food consumed in Hong Kong was imported. As she and her husband have got older, they have struggled to handle work at the pond by themselves, and have relied on help from family and other community members. “We usually call our kids and their partners over on the weekends to help,” Lai said.
Her children, though, work professional jobs during the week and have limited time to offer. In 2021, a team of architects from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) began working with San Tin locals to prototype a series of devices to streamline fish pond operations. The devices, which assist with feeding fish, monitoring water quality and pumping water between ponds, help pond operators by reducing physical labour, and reduce costs by using renewable energy.
Like the nearby Mai Po wetlands, also in Yuen Long, the San Tin fish ponds have been identified as a key habitat for more than 50,000 migrating birds , as well as for other endangered species. Fish farms have become essential to annual bird migration, and government subsidies have been offered to farmers who allowed flocks to eat fish left over after harvest. But unlike the adjacent marshes, the fish ponds are not protected from development.
For this reason, green groups have responded to the announcements of development by pushing for preservation of the ponds, citing their ecological benefits as well as cultural significance . The HKU team wanted to explore the relationship between human stewardship and nature, highlighting the balance between conservation and development that the ponds exhibited. When the government’s Northern Metropolis Development Strategy was announced in October 2021 , it further fuelled their goal to educate the public on how humans can affect their environment in both negative and positive ways.
“The San Tin Technopole and other kinds of development agendas started becoming more resolved during the design process,” said Jersey Poon, a project architect and lecturer at HKU, referring to a planned technology hub that is the cornerstone of the Northern Metropolis project. Despite a pending legal challenge against the approval of the hub’s environmental impact assessment, the government in October said it planned to “press ahead” with the project, which will ultimately result in the fish ponds being lost to construction. “[The development of the area] wasn’t really part of the original discussion – it was more about how people understood this as an ecologically valuable site,” Poon said.
HKU professor Joshua Bolchover, who has researched the area surrounding Hong Kong’s border with Shenzhen for over a decade, explained: “The way we’ve just started working with [fish farmers] is to just ask them, ‘Okay, if we’re architects, we’re interested in ecology – we want to know how you work, what the challenges are, what you think the future is going to be.’” “A lot of them,” he said, “come up with practical issues.” Pond operators cited aeration and running costs as major challenges.
According to Lai, the cost of electricity for a single month of operations exceeds HK$1,000. Lai Loi-chau, who has operated fish ponds since 1963, also pointed to climate change and rising temperatures as a new challenge. “Every year in the summer, fish get sick and die,” he said.
“They aren’t adapting well to the climate.” Declining water quality was another factor in the falling fish health. Like Lai Kam-dai, Lai Loi-chau practised integrated farming using poultry and ducks until it was banned, and recalled how it helped maintain stable pH levels in freshwater ponds.
The HKU team installed three device prototypes in the fish ponds earlier this year: a crane, which assists harvesting and supports an irrigation system between ponds; an oxygenation pump, which also assists with feeding and allows the operator to move water between ponds to control water levels; and solar panels to harness renewable energy and reduce overheads. The project was also designed to challenge assumptions about nature and development, by pointing out that land that has been shaped by humans can still be essential to natural processes. “This is not just a bucolic landscape condition, as you might imagine,” Bolchover said.
“It’s a set of industrial processes: there are bulldozers. There’s pipes, there’s electric meters, there’s mud being churned up.” Bolchover added that they wanted to encourage visitors to visit the area “to observe the wildlife, but also get a sense of the cultural legacy of this aquacultural farming for Hong Kong.
” Jamie Man’s family has ancestral ties to the area that date back more than 500 years. “I think that in general, there’s support for government initiatives to develop under the pretext that you don’t disrupt heritage and culture. And of course, preserving the traditions and the ecology – not to completely turn it into the city,” Man told HKFP.
Some 6,000 male descendants of the Man clan lay claim to land in San Tin, which comprises a trust managed by Jamie Man. He is responsible for managing tenants who operate fish ponds and coordinating logistics for the building of village houses. “There is a sense of responsibility to the village, that you need to help,” said Man, who left San Tin to pursue an education in filmmaking, and then worked in Shanghai before eventually returning to the area.
Man reconnected with his roots when he moved back to San Tin and transformed some of the land around his family’s fishponds into a community space where he hosts cultural events. “Recently for the Chung Yeung Festival we did a lot of activities around worshipping the ancestors, and the villagers having ‘pun choi’,” Man said. The space is used for weddings, holidays and an upcoming Christmas market, which will feature items produced by local craftspeople.
Man also uses the nutrient-rich soil surrounding the ponds to farm small crops of coffee beans and papaya, which he uses to create farm-to-table meals for visitors touring the area. “We’ve got more tourists now, visitors coming in, starting to learn about the village, the ancestral halls and the area,” Man said. “The villagers have started realising it’s a good thing to have more people learn about the area.
” However, that “good thing” is unlikely to last. Earlier this month, Hong Kong’s business sector signed a letter of intent expressing its support for the large-scale Northern Metropolis development scheme . As for the San Tin Technopole, the government in October said it was “targeting to have the first batch of [innovation and technology] sites formed in 2026.
” Authorities have committed to beginning work on the 338-hectare Sam Po Shue Wetland Conservation Park “to achieve the dual goals of strengthening wetland conservation and making wetland compensation” before they consume the area’s aquaculture. But the fish ponds that have supported Lai Kam-dai and Lai Loi-chau will be filled to make way for construction within the next five years. For Lai Kam-dai and her husband Chan, that will also mean the loss of their home of almost 40 years, in which they raised their children.
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said, later adding, “of course I’ll miss it.” Her husband said he thought the development would lead to an irreversible loss of culture: “Hong Kong is left with this area for fish farming. Once you lose it then fish farming will be lost.
” In an emailed response to HKFP, the Development Bureau said that 40 hectares of the conservation park would be reserved for “implementing high-density, high-tech and high-yield aquaculture operations through introducing modernised aquaculture facilities, techniques and comprehensive management.” Additionally, 263 hectares of the park would be allocated as “ecologically enhanced fishponds” to serve both dual purposes of nature conservation and pond fish culture.” According to the bureau, they will “primarily adopt traditional aquaculture operations,” while implementing modernised aquaculture techniques that sound similar to those proposed by the HKU team.
Man, too, is slated to lose his land in San Tin, including his community event space. Still, he said he held out hope that through education, cultural heritage sites would be preserved. The Development Bureau said that “indigenous villages which will be kept intact” and “historic monuments will be preserved.
” A document submitted to the Legislative Council in October about the development of the San Tin Technopole stated that “efforts should be made to avoid affecting the living environment of the villagers as far as possible.” It added: “The Administration should assist the villagers in enhancing and redeveloping the village houses of those villages to match the modern design of the San Tin Technopole.” Support HKFP | Policies & Ethics | Error/typo? | Contact Us | Newsletter | Transparency & Annual Report | Apps Help safeguard press freedom & keep HKFP free for all readers by supporting our team.
